My love, let us never separate. In six months I shall be free. Well, then, no power on earth can disunite us. _La dilecta_ was forty-six when I was twenty-two. Why talk about your forty years? We have thirty years before us. Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty years' affection?
What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from you? Then you don't know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that than you at Madame P... No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work. My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all that passes. I love you, I adore you _in æternum_. I believe in you as I do in myself. _Mon Dieu!_ I would like to know words which could infuse into you my soul and my thought, which could tell you that you are in my heart, in my blood, in my brain, in my thought,--in short, the life of my life; that each beating of my heart gives birth to a desire full of thee. Oh! you do not know what are three years of chastity, which spring at every moment to the heart and make it bound, to the head and make it palpitate. If I were not sober and did not work, this purity would drive me mad. I alone am in the secret of the terrible emotions which the emanations from your dear person give me. It is an unspeakable delirium which, by turns, freezes my nature by the omnipotence of desire, and makes me burn. I resist follies like those of the young seigneur cut down by the Elector.
We have, both of us, our sufferings; do not let us dispute that. Let us love each other, and do not refuse me that which makes all accepted. In other respects, in all things, angel, I am submissive to you as to God. Take my life, ask me to die, order me all things, except not to love you, not to desire you, not to possess you. Outside of that all is possible to me in your name.
[Footnote 1: Madame de Berny is meant, and the invention of this letter is infamous. See letter to Madame Carraud in Appendix, written _at the same time_ as this spurious letter.--TR]
If you only knew the superstitions you give me! When I work I put the talisman on my finger; I put it on the first finger of the left hand, with which I hold my paper, so that your thought clasps me. You are there, with me. Now, in seeking from the air for words and ideas, I ask them of that delicious ring; in it I have found the whole of "Séraphita."